Summer interlude

Note: This weekend, the Deep Impact probe will slam into comet 9/P Tempel 1. I will have a blog up about it probably on Saturday, after I get back from doing a BBC interview about it! I’ll have more about that as well. Until then, enjoy this summer interlude.

Summer is finally here in Northern California, which means the fog and rain have (mostly) gone. The Sun is shining, plants are blooming, and bees are in a fervor of pollen-collection.

I took this shot a few minutes ago while on hold by an incompetent hotel employee. Somehow, being ignored wasn’t so bad since I got to watch these two little guys (gals, actually) clamber around the glorious sunflowers growing behind my office.

My camera has a fantastic macro mode, so I was able to get pretty good resolution:

Even that image (click on it!) is not full-res, but I could not get enough of the image to be cool and still keep it under 400kb, and my bandwidth is somewhat of an issue. Anyway, the full-res image is phenomenal, and I’m using it as my PC desktop background now. Makes me think of iced tea, reading trashy novels, and summer constellations.

Yay!

June 30th, 2005 11:28 AM by Phil Plait in Time Sink | 8 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

8 Responses to “Summer interlude”

  1. Christopher Ferro Says:

    (Looking behind my office building)
    [mumble]Old decrepit picnic table.
    Termite ridden pepper tree.
    Half washed away pressure treated mulch.
    hmmf.[/mumble]

    BA, can I work where you work?

    CJSF

  2. DouglasG Says:

    I work in a basement office with no windows… I do have a sun drawn on the chalkboard in front of me. It just isn’t the same.

    Anyway, I look forward to your “Deep Impact” post. I hope it all works out well. Great Pictures!

  3. Russ Says:

    AAHH! The little things in life. How beautiful!

  4. JPax2003 Says:

    Sweet Summer Flower
    The bees are all a-buzzing
    Making autumn snacks

  5. Roy Batty (UK) Says:

    Yellow and the Black,
    sunny pollen gathering.
    Room at the Inn, yes? :-)

  6. Mickal555 Says:

    Hmph it’s winter here…

    Cleer sky’s ahoy though :D*

    *Actually it’s been cloudy this winter, very unuseral. :evil: ;(

  7. gopher65 Says:

    Some of those new camaras are great aren’t they! My dad just bought a new one, and it can take really high resolution pictures. The only bad thing about digitals (at least the ones I have seen) is that they limit the max exposure time in order to keep the file size down. Dad’s old camara had an 8 second limit, which isn’t quite good enough IMO. Plus of course it didn’t seem to capture as much light as a CCD *eyeroll*. You can take some really great moon shots with it though.

  8. Berkeley Says:

    The morning left
    just one impression on me;
    an angry wasp.

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